Re:Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky is moving from scie...
by tzs on Saturday September 09, 2023 @10:52PM
(#37452463)
No, I just wanted to know if we covered some large deserts with solar panels could that power enough DAC to make a difference.
A quick Googling to find current worldwide solar panel production suggests that it would take about 90 years of current production for the panels for a 500 000 km^2 solar farm, so to build enough to just cancel out current emissions would need about 180 times the resources that currently go annually into solar panel production.
So we'd probably need to increase mining (and several other things) by about 20x if we wanted to use this approach to get enough DAC to bring emissions to net zero.
I think that's about as far as I can go. I don't know enough about the availability of various resources to figure out if the various things needed are abundant enough and accessible enough that we could increase production by 20x.
A quick Googling to find current worldwide solar panel production suggests that it would take about 90 years of current production for the panels for a 500 000 km^2 solar farm, so to build enough to just cancel out current emissions would need about 180 times the resources that currently go annually into solar panel production.
So we'd probably need to increase mining (and several other things) by about 20x if we wanted to use this approach to get enough DAC to bring emissions to net zero.
I think that's about as far as I can go. I don't know enough about the availability of various resources to figure out if the various things needed are abundant enough and accessible enough that we could increase production by 20x.